Representation in Action Mark Rowlands

50372Rowlands 8/29/06 9:06 AM Page 1 philosophy/cognitive science mark rowlands mark rowlands Mark Rowlands is Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy “Might some of our doings actually be our representings? What if our In Body Language, Mark Rowlands argues that the problem of at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of basic grip on the world consisted in these representing deeds rather than representation—how it is possible for one item to represent The Body in Mind, The Nature of Consciousness, Externalism, in passive inner recapitulations prone to miss their mark? Rowlands’ care- another—has been exacerbated by the assimilation of repre- and other books. ful defense of this thought-provoking and original thesis opens up brand sentation to the category of the word. That is, the problem is new territory, bringing work on embodied and extended cognition into traditionally understood as one of relating inner to outer— contact with models of content, meaning, and action. Here is one of those relating an inner representing item to something extrinsic or A Bradford Book rare books that might actually change the way philosophers and cognitive exterior to it. Rowlands argues that at least some cases of rep- scientists think.” resentation need to be understood not in terms of the word but Andy Clark, Professor of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh of the deed. Activity, he claims, is a useful template for thinking about representation; our representing the world consists, in part, in certain sorts of actions that we perform in that world. This is not to say simply that these forms of acting can facili- tate representation but that they are themselves representational. These sorts of actions—which Rowlands calls deeds—do not merely express or re-present prior intentional states. They have an independent representational status. After introducing the notion of the deed as a “preinten- tional act,” Rowlands argues that deeds can satisfy informational, teleological, combinatorial, misrepresentational, and decouplability constraints—and so qualify as representational. He puts these principles of representation into practice by examining the deeds involved in visual perception. Representing, Rowlands argues, is something we do in the world as much as in the head. Representing does not stop at the skin, at the border between the representing subject and the world; representing is representational “all the way out.” The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu rowlands representation in action 0-262-18255-6 978-0-262-18255-3 ,!7IA2G2-bicffd!:t;K;k;K;k Body Language Body Language Representation in Action Mark Rowlands A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by SPI Publisher Services, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rowlands, Mark. Body language : representation in action / Mark Rowlands. p. cm. “A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-262-18255-6 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-262-18255-3 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Representation (Philosophy). 2. Externalism (Philosophy of mind). I. Title. B105.R4R69 2006 128'.4—dc22 2006044903 10987654321 For Emma ’Tis writ, “In the beginning was the Word.” I pause to wonder what is here inferred. The Word I cannot set supremely high A new translation I shall try. I read, if by the spirit I am taught, This sense: “In the beginning was the Thought.” This opening I need to weigh again, Or sense may suffer from a hasty pen Does Thought create, and work, and rule the hour? ’Twere best: “In the beginning was the Power.” Yet, while the pen is urged with willing fingers, A sense of doubt and hesitancy lingers. The spirit comes to guide me in my need, I write with confidence: “In the beginning was the deed.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Contents Acknowledgments xi 1 Representation: The Word and the Deed 1 2 Content Externalism 19 3 Vehicle Externalism 29 4 The Myths of the Giving 51 5 Enacting Representation 67 6 Actions, Doings, and Deeds 93 7 The Informational Constraint 113 8 The Teleological Constraint 127 9 Decouplability and Misrepresentation 157 10 The Combinatorial Constraint 177 11 Representation in Action 201 Notes 225 References 229 Index 237 Acknowledgments This project has spanned life in four countries, Ireland, England, France, and Australia, and so, as you might have gleaned, has been rumbling on for some time. During that time, I have greatly benefited from conversa- tions with: David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Paul Coates, Jerome Dokic, Paul Griffiths, Adrian Haddock, Dan Hutto, Susan Hurley, Richard Menary, Erik Myin, Alva Noë, John O’Regan, Kevin O’Regan, Elizabeth Pascherie, Karola Stotz, Josefa Toribio, Steve Torrance, and Rob Wilson. And thanks to Larry Shapiro who read the entire manuscript for MIT Press, and offered some trenchant and very useful comments. I owe special thanks to John Sutton, who arranged for me to spend six weeks in Sydney, at exactly the right time of year, where I was able to com- bine my two great interests: lying on a beach and thinking about philosophy. The two conferences on embodied cognition that John organized at that time provided a valuable opportunity to test the central arguments of this book, and without the excellent feedback I received there, I would no doubt still be scribbling away. My thanks to all involved. Thanks to the University of Hertfordshire, and to my colleagues there, for providing an excellent environment in which to pursue research. Thanks to Tom Stone at MIT, who supported this project from the word go, and thanks also to Judy Feldmann. This book was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Finally, as ever, my greatest thanks are to Emma Rowlands, for her love, support, and, of course, putting up with me while I finished this book. 1 Representation: The Word and the Deed 1 The Word This book is about the problem of representation: how is it possible for one item to represent another? We might equally call it the problem of content: how is it possible for an item to possess another as its content? Or the problem of meaning: how is it possible for one item to mean another? Or the problem of intentionality: how is it possible for one item to take another as its intentional object? Or the problem of aboutness: how is it possible for one item to be about another? The central contention of the book is that the problem has been exacerbated, perhaps to the point of insolubility, by a critical, yet largely unnoticed, assimilation: the assimilation of representation to the category of the word. Because of this the problem has almost always been understood as one of relating inner to outer—of relating an inner representing item to an item that is extrinsic or exterior to it in such a way that the former can be about the latter, or have the latter as its content. Understood in this way, representation has seemed deeply problematic, even mysterious. However, I shall argue that it is not this sort of problem at all. Representation has nothing, essentially, to do with the relation between a representing item and something extrinsic to it. Accordingly, it has nothing essentially to do with the connection between the inner and the outer. The hope is that divesting the problem of representation of this connection to the inner–outer divide robs it of at least some of its mystery. What was a latent problem becomes a patent problem, and, therefore— maybe, just maybe—not so much of a problem at all. Words sit on a page. The words that comprise this book are internal to the book in the sense of located spatially inside it. Their presence in the book is something that has genuine duration: they begin at a reasonably determinate time—when first inscribed—and end at a reasonably determinate time—when they finally fade from the page, or the book is destroyed 2 Chapter 1 through misadventure; and, in the meantime, their presence in the book has no intervening lacunas. These words are the bearers of content or meaning, and they are so in virtue of standing in appropriate relations to things outside of, or extrinsic to, them. Of course, in themselves, they mean nothing at all. To have meaning, they must first be interpreted. This inter- pretation is something in which they have no say—they are passive in this regard. Let’s look at each of these ideas in a little more detail. 1 Internality The claim that words are internal to a book or other docu- ment is, of course, a claim about word-tokens, not word-types. It is unclear, to say the least, where word-types are located, and, indeed, they may be located nowhere at all. But word-tokens exist in clearly identifiable regions of space. If in doubt, just look at the previous instantiation of the word “space.” 2 Genuine duration Not only do word-tokens occupy identifiable regions of space, they also occupy similarly identifiable regions of time.

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